Over the weekend at SXSW in Austin, Gearbox and Telltale Games sat down at a panel to dish out new details on their upcoming collaboration Tales from the Borderlands, a new episodic game which the two companies announced this past December. Tales from the Borderlands will take place after the story of Borderlands 2, but won’t focus on any of that story’s main characters (though familiar faces will still make appearances). Instead, the story revolves around two main protagonists, which were shown in that brief teaser from December: a con-artist named Fiona and a Hyperion employee named Rhys.
The way the game plays out for you, the player, actually sounds very interesting. You’ll play through the plot of the game as retold by each character after the fact, and being the nefarious characters that they are, each one’s version of the story doesn’t quite match up with what really happened. After you’ve seen the story from both characters’ perspectives, you’ll have to determine which parts are the truth, what they were lying about, and ultimately find out what really happened in the wacky world of Pandora. You can actually watch the entire SXSW panel discussion in the lengthy video below, but Polygon has done a great job of summing up all the major information if you’re more of a Cliffs Notes type person.
Unfortunately, no gameplay was shown and there wasn’t much discussion on the actual game mechanics. Given Telltale’s most recent episodic adventures, Walking Dead: The Game and The Wolf Among Us, I’d imagine Tales from the Borderlands will function pretty similarly. Lead designer at Telltale Harrison Pink did confirm that there would be gunplay in the game, a hallmark of the series, but that it would be done “in a Telltale kind of way." There will also be a heavy emphasis on player choice as you make your way through the adventure, which Pink compared to how Walking Dead would force the player to make a choice between two pretty undesirable options. However, as this is a Borderlands game and its world of Pandora is filled with greedy people, your choices will actually be desirable, self-serving ones rather than the “lesser of two evils" approach of Walking Dead. I’d imagine you’ll be choosing things that are the most beneficial to yourself, no matter who else it screws over in the process.
Be sure to check out the full video or source link below for more information on Tales form the Borderlands, and although no specific release dates were discussed the game is on target for some point in 2014 on all major consoles, PCs and mobile devices. When more specific details are released we’ll be sure to let you know.
[Polygon]
